Beijing, 1948. A bleak winter night. A man rides through the war-ridden city and returns home. He finds a letter awaits him. Its a letter written by a woman before her death. In the letter she tells him the story of her love for him, a life-long passion that has not diminshed over time, but one that he has never known. The woman's story spans eighteen years from the moment, she a thirteen-years old girl lets her eyes on her cashing new neighbor. She tells their brief but passionate love in her youth, the hardship she goes through raising their child alone, and their final encounter after the war, during which the man fails to recognize her and one which leaves her in despair. Now having lost her son, her only tie with the man she loves, she no longer has the courage to live on. Only in a letter she is in capable of telling him everything, for the first and last time. Shaken by the letter, the man searches his memory for the nameless woman......